The report – “Shaping future financial and fiscal policies for a more circular economy in the UK” – was compiled by Resource Futures and looks at specific strategies to incentivise circularity, notably the use of EPR schemes to explicitly promote reuse.
These other headline findings include:
- Designing more nuanced incentives to achieve contemporary circular economy and waste management goals: reuse and reduction, higher quality recycling, and decarbonisation.
- Refocusing policy development efforts to sectors and material streams with higher overall impacts.
- Improving existing fiscal levers to create stronger incentives for circularity, including of inert materials.
- Ensuring strong data, monitoring and enforcement, which are essential to ensure incentives have the intended effects.
Dan Cooke, CIWM director of policy, communications and external affairs, commented: “The benefits of incentivising a more circular UK economy, one where materials are kept in use for as long as possible, are clear. It creates jobs, enables economic growth, and delivers resource resilience and carbon reduction.
“This timely piece of research provides useful insights for our sector, policy makers, governments and the Circular Economy Taskforce. The findings can help us consider how well-crafted financial incentives and policies can most effectively move us towards a more circular UK economy.
“The report shows that financial levers can have a powerful effect, and several have already driven positive trends to move materials and behaviours up the waste hierarchy. It also shows that strong data, monitoring and enforcement are essential to ensure incentives have the intended effects.”
The research is separated into three overarching aims of resources policy: decarbonising the waste sector, increasing recycling and reducing resource consumption.
Susan Evans, policy lead at Resource Futures, added: “The policy incentives for a more circular, lower-carbon economy need to be adjusted and improved over time as we learn from experience what works and where the gaps are. This report highlights areas where more nuanced fiscal and financial incentives are needed to drive not just more recycling, but higher-quality recycling that contributes more to the economy, as well as reuse and remanufacturing activities which can drastically reduce the environmental impacts of our resource use.”
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